By Gal Gazit, Plumbing & Heating Growth

More installers hold a heat pump qualification today than at any point since the scheme began, and City Plumbing and VitoEnergy’s own coverage of the trade has made that plain enough.

What gets written about far less is the part that comes after the training, turning a certificate into a steady, profitable stream of local install work rather than an occasional job that happens to come in.

That gap is worth taking seriously, because the demand behind it is real and growing.

The Boiler Upgrade Scheme now pays £7,500 towards an air or ground source heat pump, and £9,000 for eligible off-gas-grid oil and LPG homes since the rate rose on 21 July, running through to 31 March 2027 across England and Wales. That is a genuine subsidy sitting in front of homeowners who are already halfway to a decision.

The question for most firms is not whether the demand exists, it is whether they are the name that homeowner finds when they go looking.

Every heating firm, in practice, is serving two different customers.

The first is the Friday evening emergency caller, worth perhaps £80 a job, who rings whoever answers the phone and has usually forgotten the firm’s name by Monday.

The second is the researching installation buyer, worth anywhere from £3,500 to £12,000, who spends two or three weeks reading, comparing, and weighing options before they ever pick up the phone.

Almost all trade marketing, from the van signage down to the Google listing, is built entirely for the first customer. The second one is left to work it out for themselves, usually by reading whatever comes up first when they search.

This matters because the researching buyer behaves nothing like the emergency caller.

They are not choosing based on who answers fastest, they are choosing based on who looks like they actually know what they are doing, whose reviews mention heat pumps specifically rather than boiler callouts, and whose site or listing actually answers the questions running through the buyer’s head before they get in touch.

A firm can be genuinely excellent at the install and still lose the job simply because none of that was visible when the buyer was doing their research.

The commercial cost of getting this wrong is not hypothetical, and it is not really about speed either, though speed still matters.

The most cited study on the subject, an HBR analysis of 2,241 US companies published back in 2011, found that firms responding to an online lead within the hour were dramatically more likely to qualify it than firms that took a day.

Fifteen years on it is still the number most worth remembering, because it captures something that hasn’t changed, a buyer doing real research treats a slow reply as a signal, not an inconvenience.

What closing the gap actually looks like in practice is less dramatic than it sounds.

Flow Plus Plumbing, a firm in north London, rebuilt a single landing page around installation work rather than general callouts, built around the questions a researching buyer actually asks rather than a plain list of services.

Google Business Profile clicks rose 880 percent, impressions rose 1,226 percent, and the firm had four qualified installation enquiries in the first fortnight after the page went live.

Nothing about the underlying trade changed, the work was exactly as good as it had always been. What changed was that the researching buyer could finally find proof of it before they called.

None of this replaces training, and it was never meant to.

A firm still needs the qualification, the confidence, and the technical grounding to do the install properly once the job is won. But the training gets a firm to the starting line, it does not get the phone to ring.

The firms picking up more of this work are not necessarily the most qualified ones in their area, they are the ones a researching buyer can actually find, and can actually trust, in the two or three weeks before that buyer is ready to call.

For a trade title that already covers the real business of fitting and selling rather than just the products themselves, this feels like the natural next chapter to that conversation, the part where training turns into work.